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The Interplay of American Political Culture and Public Policy: The Sacramento River as a Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Robert Kelley
Robert Kelley
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

Historians of the United States have learned much in the past twenty years about the history of what is now called its political culture, and about its environmental history.1 These two dimensions of national life, however, are rarely, if ever, looked at together. The result is that we little understand how powerfully environmental policy is influenced not simply by everyday politics—of that we know abundantly—but by the long-term political mentalities of the Democrats and the Republicans, mentalities which originate not in abstract theorizing, but which grow up naturally within the cultural worlds to be found among the distinctive groups of peoples who line up within one party or the other and remain there, generation after generation. What I propose here is to put political culture and natural resource management history together and see what happens.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1989

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References

Notes

1. It may be asked, What is “political culture?” A useful analogy may be to point to the difference between reporting the play-by-play action in a given athletic contest and describing the encompassing background of the game itself: the rules of play; the coaches’ contrasting ideas about tactics, even perhaps about the game's significance in the larger scheme of things; the kinds of people the two teams characteristically recruit, with their individual values and styles of behavior, their sense of cohesion, and their effective sense of team spirit. Political culture is a term referring to the larger context within which daily politics proceeds.

The literature on the history of political culture in the U.S. begins with Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar. Later works also built around this concept include: Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” The American Historical Review 82 (1977), 531–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century(New York, 1979);Google Scholar a number of major studies by Kleppner, Paul, of which the most extensive is The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892 (Chapel Hill, 1979)Google Scholar and the most recent is Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893–1928 (New York and Westport, Conn., 1978);Google ScholarFormisano, Ronald P., The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar and The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983);Google ScholarJensen, Richard, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896 (Chicago, 1971);Google Scholar and McSeveney, Samuel T., The Politics of Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1893–1896 (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

The point being made above is that while the basic literature of environmental history often has much in it which describes the impact of politics and even the ideas of key individuals, it does not in any systematic way bring in what is now known of political culture to provide a deeper explanation. Thus, in the most recent work in this genre by Samuel P. Hays, a book of great conceptual power and scholarly depth, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York and Cambridge, England, 1987),Google Scholar there is extensive treatment of the ideas and actions of such key figures as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, but only a single entry in the index, referring to one page, under “Democratic Party, environmental voting in,” and two entries, referring to two single pages, under “Republican Party: environmental voting patterns of” and “environmental contingent of.”

For the leading works in environmental history, in addition to this volume by Hays and his brilliant, classic study, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1959),Google Scholar see Petulla, Joseph, American Environmental History: The Exploration and Conservation of Natural Resources (San Francisco, 1977)Google Scholar; Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven, 1983)Google Scholar; Worster, Donald, Nature's Economy (San Francisco, 1977)Google Scholar; Richardson, Elmo, Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897–1913 (Berkeley, 1962)Google Scholar; and Swain, Donald, Federal Conservation Policy, 1921–1922 (Berkeley, 1963).Google Scholar

2. The Sacramento itself is actually 370 miles long from its headwaters in California's Trinity Mountains to the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, but local usage restricts the term “Sacramento Valley” to the flatlands downstream from Red Bluff. For its natural condition and flooding characteristics, see an essay by the geographer Thompson, Kenneth, “Historic Flooding in the Sacramento Valley,” Pacific Historical Review 20 (1960), 349–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The foregoing information in this essay concerning the Sacramento River, and the historical information which follows, is drawn from research conducted for my larger forthcoming work, currently in press, to be published by the University of California Press: Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Remaking of the Sacramento Valley, 1850–1980. A preliminary overview, prepared much earlier, may be found in “Taming the Sacramento: Hamiltonianism in Action,” Pacific Historical Review 34 (1965), 21–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For the Arkansas Act, see United States, Statutes at Large, IX, Chapter LXXXIV, 519–20. On the total acreage of swamplands in California, see State of California, State Engineer [William Ham. Hall], Report … to the Legislature of the State of California: Part II (Sacramento, 1881), 8.

4. Peterson, Richard H., “The Failure to Reclaim: California State Swamp Land Policy and the Sacramento Valley, 1850–1866,” Southern California Quarterly 56 (Spring 1974), 45–60Google Scholar; McGowan, Joseph A., History of the Sacramento Valley (New York and Palm Beach, 1961), IGoogle Scholar, 283–92; Thompson, John, “The Settlement Geography of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California” (doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1957), 185–204.Google Scholar

5. In the most powerful work on policy analysis presently in use, Brewer, Garry D. and Leon's, Peter deThe Foundations of Policy Analysis (Homewood, 111., 1983)Google Scholar, the authors return repeatedly to the need first to think of context in order to gain sound understanding. “Contextuality means understanding the relationship between the parts and whole of a problem. … We urge comprehensiveness by giving preference to the whole” (13). The analyst must “identify the relevant contextual or environmental parameters … and determine how the problem fits into the general organizational environment” (45). “The first factor is the context of the problem. … What are the environmental, normative, technological, and political constraints? … [W]hat values or ends are being pursued[?] … What interactions with other persons and groups within the general political, social, and economic environment are necessary to attain these ends [?].….A primary consideration for the decision maker is the overall context. … The political culture of the system should be considered” (191–92). “A sensitive appreciation of specific, realistic contexts in which decisions are made and results are sought is a necessary prerequisite to understanding and action” (206).

6. This fundamental point about American political culture has been made by many observers, from Alexis de Tocqueville to James Bryce to the International Money Fund in the 1980s, which reported the United States economy to be far and away the least socialized in the world, with 95 percent of its economy run by private enterprise. Robert N. Bellah and his co-authors in their densely researched work, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985)Google Scholar, explore the subject in depth.

My own experience while teaching at Moscow University (1979) and giving lectures to combined audiences of academics and journalists in India (1986), and in the course of many culture-probing conversations with European and Japanese scholars, during which this topic has been of central concern, has taught me how deep and insistent is both this picture and the reality of the Americans as an almost uniquely individualistic people in the world, and thus perceived as being on the edge of anarchy. How the American system works at all, given such conditions, is a continuing puzzle to the Russians—as, doubtless, it also is to many Americans.

7. As explored in Bailyn, Bernard, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar, and Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776- 1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).Google Scholar

8. This general sketch of the Democratic political mind has been drawn from many sources, including: Meyers, Marvin, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945)Google Scholar; chaps. 7 and 8 in Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion, and chaps. 5 and 6 in Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics.

9. Scheiber, Harry N., “State Law and ‘Industrial Policy’ in American Development, 1790–1987,” California Law Review 75 (January 1987), 415–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pisani, Donald J., “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” The Journal of American History 74 (December 1987), 740–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See “The Jacksonian Party System, 1828–1854: The Cultural Dimension,” in Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics.

11. Ibid.

12. For the foregoing concerning the Whig mentality, see Daniel Walker Howe's brilliant work, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979).Google Scholar

13. Ellison, William Henry, A Self-Governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950)Google Scholar, and Delmatier, Royce D., Mclntosh, Clarence F., and Waters, Earl G., eds., The Rumble of California Politics: 1848–1970 (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

14. Marysville Herald, October 21, 1854.

15. Ellison, A Self-Goveming Dominion, passim.

16. Andrew Jackson's Maysville Road Veto (1830) was also a famous event of historic proportions. See Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 40–41, 52, 56; Sellers, Charles, James K. Polk: Continentalist 1843–1846 (Princeton, 1966), 472–74Google Scholar. Revealing the deep partisan differences on this policy, in the Senate the Whigs supported the bill 21–3, while the Democrats were evenly divided, 13–13, many of the affirmative votes following Southerner John C. Calhoun's tactical bid in this matter to curry favor with the people of the Old Northwest, in a move that caused much comment, since it jarred so with his earlier views.

The point that the policy standpoints of the major political parties shaped the policy decisions of the states as well as those of the national government has been solidly established in two separate studies: concerning six state legislatures in these years, Ershkowitz, Herbert and Shade, William G., “Consensus or Conflict? Political Behavior in the State Legislatures During the Jacksonian Era,” Journal of American History 58 (December 1971), 591–621CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for the late nineteenth century, Campbell, Ballard C., Jr., has explored the question in his thorough analysis, Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Thompson, “The Settlement Geography of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” 185–96; McGowan, History of the Sacramento VaUey, 283–84.

18. For this complex reconstitution of national politics, see, among other sources, Burnham, Walter Dean, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century, chap. 7; Holt, Michael F., “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism,” Journal of American History 60 (September 1973), 309–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860 (New Haven, 1969)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970)Google Scholar: Formisano, Ronald P., The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar; Potter, David M., The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

19. John E. Baur, “The Beginnings of the Republican Party,” 40–69, in Delmatier et al., The Rumble of California Politics 1848–1970; Ellison, A Self-Governing Dominion, 268–314.

20. Ibid.

21. On the new attitude toward government in the Northern states which emerged in these years, see Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; concerning the Civil War Republican legislation, Curry, Leonard P., Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, 1968).Google Scholar

22. Thompson, “Settlement Geography of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” 194.

23. Peterson, “The Failure to Reclaim,” Southern California Quarterly, 60.

24. State of California, Statutes (1861), chap. CCCLII, 355–61; Journal of the Assembly, April 8, 1861, 675Google Scholar; Journal of the Senate, May 1, 1861, 721; for 1860 county votes, see Bauer, “The Beginnings of the Republican Party,” 51, in Delmatier et al., The Rumble of California Politics.

25. Scheiber, “State Law and ‘Industrial Policy’ in American Development, 1790— 1987,” 418.

26. Pisani, Donald J., From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850–1931 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 130–35.Google Scholar

27. Peterson, “The Failure to Reclaim,” Southern California Quarterly, 50–52; Thompson, “Settlement Geography of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” 196–98; McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley, 284–85; Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California (Oakland, 1880), 186.Google Scholar

28. Sources cited in note 25.

29. Baur, “The Beginnings of the Republican Party,” 54–59, in Delmatier et al., The Rumble of California Politics.

30. Melendy, H. Brett and Gilbert, Benjamin F., The Governors of California: Peter H. Burnett to Edmund G. Brown (Georgetown, Calif., 1965), 146–48.Google Scholar

31. See the comments of “N.N.” deploring the ending of the “experiment,” in Sacramento Daily Union, March 31 and April 2, 1866.

32. Pisani, From Family Farm to Agribusiness, 5–11.

33. State of California, Statutes (1865–66), chap. DLXX, 799–801; Sacramento Daily Union, March 22, 1866.

34. Green, Will S., The History of Colusa County, California, and General History of the State (1880), 76Google Scholar; The Colusa Sun (Calif.), March 14, 1868.

35. State of California, Statutes (1867–68), chap. CCCCXV, “An Act to provide for the management and sale of the lands belonging to the State, approved Mar. 28, 1868,” 507–30, (esp. Part II, “Swamp and Overflowed, Salt Marsh and Tide Lands,” 514–21); Green, Colusa County, California, 58; Sun, March 18, 1868; McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley, I, 283–92; E. A. Bailey, “Historical Summary of State Legislative Action with Results Accomplished in Reclamation of Swamp and Overflowed Lands of Sacramento Valley, California,” in State of California, State Engineer, Sacramento Flood Control Project: Revised Plans (Sacramento, 1927), Appendix D.

36. McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley, I, 285.

37. See the despairing first annual report of the Commissioner of Public Works to California's governor concerning the cumulative experience of reclamation laissez faire in the Sacramento Valley: Report to the Governor of California (1895), 58–60.

38. The Republican 1880 sweep of the state's legislature and governor's chair grew out of complex political developments in the late 1870s which saw California write and adopt a new constitution in 1879, following which its supporters divided among themselves, and the Republicans, who opposed it, seized victory. See Benjamin F. Gilbert, “The Period of the Workingmen's Party,” in Delmatier et al., The Rumble of California Politics, 70–98; Saxton, Alexander, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 104–28Google Scholar; Jones, Mable B., “The Republican Party in California, 1877–1881” (M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1957), 66–67Google Scholar; Davis, Winfield J., History of Political Conventions in California, 1849–1892 (Sacramento, 1893), 421.Google Scholar

39. Chapter 4 in Kelley, , Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California's Sacramento Valley (Glendale, Calif., 1959)Google Scholar. See chapter 7 in Pisani, From Family Farm to Agribusiness.

40. Chapter 5 in Kelley, Gold vs. Grain.

41. Chapter 9 in Pisani, From Family Farm to Agribusiness.

42. McSeveney, Samuel T., The Politics of Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1892–1896 (Princeton, 1972).Google Scholar

43. Delmatier et al., The Rumble of California Politics, chaps. 4–7.

44. See the annual reports of the Commissioner of Public Works, State of California, for the years 1895, 1896, 1898, and 1901, for the remarkable upsurge of valley-wide planning and the beginnings of the construction of major flood-control works by this office, once it was created in 1893.

45. Kelley, , “Taming the Sacramento: Hamiltonianism in Action,” Pacific Historical Review 34 (February 1965), 31–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kahrl, William L., Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982)Google Scholar; Hundley, Norris, Jr., Dividing the Waters: A Century of Controversy Between the United States and Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966).Google Scholar

46. Kelley, “Taming the Sacramento,” 38–41; Olin, Spencer C., Jr., California's Prodigal Sons: Hiram Johnson and the Progressives 1911–1917 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968)Google Scholar; The People exrel W. G. Chapman v. Sacramento Drainage District, 155 Cal 373.

47. What was generally called “The Jackson Report,” describing and recommending the Sacramento Flood Control Project, is to be found in: U.S. Government, Secretary of War, California Debris Commission, Reports on the Control of Floods in the River Systems of the Sacramento Valley and the Adjacent San Joaquin Valley, Cal., House of Representatives, 62nd Cong., lst sess., Doc. 81 (Washington, D.C., 1911).

48. See chapter 14, “A Valley Transformed: 1905–1980, in Kelley, forthcoming, Battling the Inland Sea “Taming the Sacramento,” 43–49; Starr, Kevin, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York, 1985), 132–39.Google Scholar

49. Consult the works cited in note 1 above.